A simple proposal on a 1982 electronic bulletin board helped sarcasm flourish online:
On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university's bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as "the inventor...or at least one of the inventors" of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.
The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon's "bboard," which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.
That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled "WARNING!" He claimed that an elevator had been "contaminated with mercury" and suffered "some slight fire damage" due to a physics experiment. Despite clarifying posts noting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.
The incident sparked immediate discussion about how to prevent such misunderstandings and the "flame wars" (heated arguments) that could result from misread intent.
"This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously," Fahlman later wrote in a retrospective post published on his CMU website. "After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone."
On September 17, 1982, the next day after the misunderstanding on the CMU bboard, Swartz made the first concrete proposal: "Maybe we should adopt a convention of putting a star (*) in the subject field of any notice which is to be taken as a joke."
Within hours, multiple Carnegie Mellon computer scientists weighed in with alternative proposals. Joseph Ginder suggested using % instead of *. Anthony Stentz proposed a nuanced system: "How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes?" Keith Wright championed the ampersand (&), arguing it "looks funny" and "sounds funny." Leonard Hamey suggested {#} because "it looks like two lips with teeth showing between them."
Meanwhile, some Carnegie Mellon users were already using their own solution. A group on the Gandalf VAX system later revealed they had been using \__/ as "universally known as a smile" to mark jokes. But it apparently didn't catch on beyond that local system.
Two days after Swartz's initial proposal, Fahlman entered the discussion with his now-famous post: "I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways." He added that serious messages could use :-(, noting, "Maybe we should mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends."
What made Fahlman's proposal work wasn't that he invented the concept of joke markers—Swartz had done that. It wasn't that he invented smile symbols at Carnegie Mellon, since the \__/ already existed. Rather, Fahlman synthesized the best elements from the ongoing discussion: the simplicity of single-character proposals, the visual clarity of face-like symbols, the sideways-reading principle hinted at by Hamey's {#}, and a complete binary system that covered both humor :-) and seriousness :-(.
[...] The emoticons spread quickly across ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern Internet, reaching other universities and research labs. By November 10, 1982—less than two months later—Carnegie Mellon researcher James Morris began introducing the smiley emoticon concept to colleagues at Xerox PARC, complete with a growing list of variations. What started as an internal Carnegie Mellon convention over time became a standard feature of online communication, often simplified without the hyphen nose to :) or :(, among many other variations.
[...] While Fahlman's text-based emoticons spread across Western online culture that remained text-character-based for a long time, Japanese mobile phone users in the late 1990s developed a parallel system: emoji. For years, Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 set for NTT DoCoMo was widely cited as the original. However, recent discoveries have revealed earlier origins. SoftBank released a picture-based character set on mobile phones in 1997, and the Sharp PA-8500 personal organizer featured selectable icon characters as early as 1988.
Unlike emoticons that required reading sideways, emoji were small pictographic images that could convey emotion, objects, and ideas with more detail. When Unicode standardized emoji in 2010 and Apple added an emoji keyboard to iOS in 2011, the format exploded globally. Today, emoji have largely replaced emoticons in casual communication, though Fahlman's sideways faces still appear regularly in text messages and social media posts.
As Fahlman himself notes on his website, he may not have been "the first person ever to type these three letters in sequence." Others, including teletype operators and private correspondents, may have used similar symbols before 1982, perhaps even as far back as 1648. Author Vladimir Nabokov suggested before 1982 that "there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile." And the original IBM PC included a dedicated smiley character as early as 1981 (perhaps that should be considered the first emoji).
What made Fahlman's contribution significant wasn't absolute originality but rather proposing the right solution at the right time in the right context. From there, the smiley could spread across the emerging global computer network, and no one would ever misunderstand a joke online again. :-)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday November 25, @07:11PM
In Chess notation used in old newspapers and books, '!' was conventionally used as a strong move mark and '?' for weak move.
Evolved to '!!" as smart move, '!!!' exceptionally clever move, usually leads to winning, '??' dumb move, '???' loosing move.
With additional meanings of '?!' dangerous move creating self-risk, or '!?' strange or dubious move, often leading to unclear position.
Metasymbols. It's all about strategic evaluation, not about material evaluation.
In old times, I often used this chess notation in source comments instead of expletives. All fellow programmers understood what I mean at the relevant place.
'!!???' => "Looks nice but is actually stupid as hell". Yes, it became a metalanguage on its own.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday November 25, @07:15PM
If you are going to go to back before the computer era, then like the invention of the wheel I think it would be hard to pin-point who invented the emoticon. No doubt soon after printing technology came into being, someone somewhere noticed that you could print what looks like a sideways smiley face using the print typeface.
It just seems like the logical progression of when people drew smiley faces by hand. Something that people seem to do instinctively (I've watched young children do it without needing to be shown how to do it), no doubt in some way connected with our way of "seeing faces" in all kinds of places.
In fact it may have been such an obvious thing to do that nobody really bothered writing about the "new creation", and as it was not a serious thing to print it is unlikely to be seen in the kind of official/serious documents/books that would have been preserved through the ages.
Still, an interesting article, as it pinpoints when and where it became a thing in the computer era and specifically the reasoning why, along with the other variations and how it evolved over time to our present day.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday November 25, @07:23PM (1 child)
Use the only thing kids today understand:
'69' if its a good thing
'6-7' if it's a bad or banned thing.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, @01:11AM
I was born in '68. Elder GenX, stuck in the middle, pretty much ignored. Perfect. I like it that way.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 25, @08:24PM (4 children)
Okay it's really stupid.
The fact that there are millions of people out there who can only detect sarcasm by tone of voice speaks to me of functional illiteracy. A sign of a person who has never read fiction outside of school mandates in their life, and has this become crippled in reading basic context clues from the written word.
Every /s and winking emoji, a sign of being totally failed by their education. Symbols of wits dulled by laugh tracks, and painful marvel movie quips.
The English language provides us with dozens of subtle clues, and the subtlety is part and parcel with the humor. It can't be separated. One can't wag their eyebrows at an attractive person and say loud "that was a double entendre.". It's painful to watch happen online just as much.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mrpg on Wednesday November 26, @12:01AM (2 children)
Some people have problems understanding that, like people in the spectrum, people ESL.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday November 26, @04:53AM
Yeah, and I'm sure there's no shortage of either of those at the Carnegie Mellon physics department.
But I nonetheless submit that the death of subtlety has been a negative for communication.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 26, @06:51PM
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday November 26, @06:43PM
Considering that something like 9/10 of communication is non-verbal, that's pretty much to be expected. You simply cannot communicate in a time efficient manner using just words.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, @01:18AM (2 children)
I started college in September 1981 at another Pennsylvania university, Penn State. PSU was (maybe still is) a big IBM site. Rumor was we were a beta site, I'm not sure. Anyway I quickly became friends with a comp sci major who was very versed in jcl and many other mainframe technologies. We had some kind of email system- I don't remember it, but I vividly remember said friend using emoticons in that first month (9/1981). So my point is I think other people were already doing emoticons, but for some reason people referenced in TFA are getting the credit?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 26, @06:50PM (1 child)
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 30, @01:25AM
Can I show what? A faked email from 1981? Or a fake printout on wide carriage lined IBM paper? If you have any other ideas, LMK.
No, I can't show nor prove it, although aforementioned friend ended up working full-time at PSU in the computer department, and I see his name associated with several research projects. Super bright guy.
Other than paper printout, I'm not sure how I would have been able to save anything from those days. We had storage space, both disk and tape, but they would have been purged shortly after the class and account ended.
BTW, the mainframe was an IBM 360, upgraded to 370 a couple of years later. It ran MVS. We used interactive terminals running CMS. Some people were still using "IBM cards" - 80-column 12-rows Hollerith encoded. Either way we ran a few lines of JCL to submit the job to the mainframe. You had up to 5 seconds of CPU time per run job submitted. You could log in remotely, but was slow. The computer center / building had lots of IBM 3270 displays. They were fast, full-screen. Mostly used Xedit editor. I remember really liking it. Wrote in many languages including BASIC, Fortran (4 and Watfiv), PL/C, Rexx,... Ah the good old days.
Oh- I guess I could have saved stuff on punched 80-column cards, but I don't think I ever did.